AMD Shows Off Threadripper and Ryzen Mobile, and Dates EPYC and Vega

Last night AMD held its conference at Computex, where it shared some of what we saw at the Financial Analyst Day earlier this month, but also some new information. At FAD AMD revealed the Zen-based server chips, codenamed Naples, would be officially named EPYC, and at Computex their launch date was given of June 20.

Of course EPYC is not exactly a part meant for most people, but there was also some good news for the Ryzen series of CPUs. A lot of this news was from the OEMs that are putting Ryzen into their offerings, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, and Lenovo. The ASUS Republic of Gamers Strix GL7027C laptop will actually use a Ryzen 7 CPU, making it the world's first 8-core gaming laptop. AMD also announced its entire Ryzen desktop line-up, including the Ryzen 3 processors that will be launching in Q3, have earned Oculus approval to be VR Ready and VR Ready Premium. Ryzen Mobile was also held up for everyone to see and used in a 2-in-1 convertible laptop. The Ryzen Mobile APUs will feature 4 cores/8 threads and use a Vega-based GPU component for graphics.

Ryzen Threadripper, the HEDT processor series with up to 16 cores/32 threads that was announced at FAD, was shown off as well, with the chip being held up for everyone to see, running a Blender demo, and was combined with four Vega Frontier Edition cards and two RX Vega gaming GPUs. The demo with four Vega Frontier cards was in part to show off the 64 PCIe 3.0 lanes the entire Threadripper lineup will feature, along with quad-channel DDR memory support. Vega Frontier Edition GPUs will be arriving on June 27 while the RX Vega gaming cards are expected to launch at SIGGRAPH, which is being held the end of July. Still have a while to wait for those, but AMD did at least show off two of them, with Threadripper, being used to play Prey at 4K. (Unfortunately no performance metric was displayed, but screen tearing was quite evident.)

It looks like June should be a good month for those in the professional market, but consumers may have longer to wait for new hardware